Dangerous Games (9 page)

T
he next morning I waited for Soph at the school gate as usual, but she didn't come.
Maybe she's sick
, I told myself as I walked into school alone. But I knew she wasn't sick.

Soph was already in her seat when I took my place for home room. We sat next to each other and I tried to catch her eye as I slid into my seat. But she was elaborately busy filling in her diary and refused to acknowledge me.

‘Hi,' I said tentatively.

‘Hi,' she said, without looking up.

‘I'm sorry about Saturday night,' I said.

‘Mm,' said Soph.

But she still hadn't looked at me.

The teacher walked in then and started taking the roll. Soph had never paid such close attention to rollcall and notices before.

Soph jumped up and hurried for the door as soon as home room was over. I stumbled to my feet and chased after her, determined to clear the air.

‘Look, about Saturday,' I said, ‘I just wanted you to know that I would never, ever –'

I broke off. I wanted to swear on my mother's grave that I would never do anything to hurt her – or the horrible Draz. (Well, nothing life-threatening, anyway.) But the corridor was packed with classmates and I couldn't say anything in front of them. And so the words died in my mouth.

‘The thing is,' Soph said in a tight, anxious voice, ‘I don't think we should sit together anymore.'

‘Oh,' I said, crestfallen.

‘No offence. I just think it would be easier. For both of us. If you know what I mean.'

‘Oh,' I said. ‘Okay. If that's what you want.'

‘I think it would be best,' Soph said. And with that she walked off and left me there while people streamed heedlessly around me.

You know what school's like. Everyone has their own seat that they sit in every time. It never changes. You find your spot at the start of the year and then that's where you sit until the end of the year. But now I had to find a new spot to sit in all the classes I shared with Soph – and that was four subjects. Everybody stared when they saw us not sitting together. I could hear the whispering. I knew Soph could hear it too. It felt so wrong to be sitting in class and being the object of the whispers for once instead of being one of the whisperers. But Soph wasn't speaking to me. I had no-one to whisper with.

‘What's up with you and Soph?' Mina asked me as we walked between classes together.

‘Oh, nothing,' I said. ‘It's not worth explaining.'

But of course it wasn't nothing. It felt like the end of everything.

T
hat week was one of the slowest, awfulest, loneliest weeks of my life. The first day, I tried to pretend nothing was wrong and hung out with all my old friends as usual. Soph was silent through recess, which put a dampener on everything. Then at lunchtime she went to the canteen and never came back. On Tuesday she went and sat somewhere different at recess, and took Mina and Kelly with her. At lunchtime, Sarah and Emily defected too. By Wednesday, it was clear it was just me and Celeste, and I think she was only sticking with me because she felt sorry for me.

‘What on earth happened on Saturday night?' she asked.

‘I think we're just moving in different directions,' I said.

I wished I could tell Celeste. She'd been so loyal she deserved to know the truth. But I couldn't tell her the truth – not even a version of it.

Thursday crawled by, and so did Friday. And on Friday afternoon, a very surprising thing happened.

Ben was waiting for me on my way home from school.

‘Hey,' he said.

‘Hey,' I said, surprised. I'd given up sending him text messages two days before. He hadn't replied to any of them.

‘Did you get home all right on Saturday night?' he asked.

This didn't seem the moment to get into all that, so I said, ‘Yes.'

Then we both said, ‘I'm sorry –' and broke off, and he sort of laughed, and I sort of laughed, and then he paused so I could keep talking, so I said, ‘I'm sorry I didn't tell you about Finn. I don't know why I didn't. It's just – I knew you didn't like him and –'

‘It's not that I don't like him –' Ben began. He broke off and started again. ‘The other night – I over-reacted,' he said, a little abruptly. ‘If he really does know stuff we don't, then we should find out what he's got to show us.'

‘You mean it?' Suddenly the clouds – or at least some of them – seemed to be lifting from my world.

‘Sure,' Ben said.

‘That's good, because there's something I've been wanting to talk to you about.'

And I told him all about the day Finn and me had gone hunting agents. I explained about opening your mind up to the universe and feeling the vibrations and how I hadn't actually felt it yet but I thought if we practised we might be able to get it to work. (I remembered what Finn had told me: that some destroyers – and I was pretty sure he'd meant Ben – just couldn't do it at all. But that was another thing I didn't want to get into right then.)

Ben's mind was already racing. ‘Well, it would make sense,' he said. ‘The agents of order have ways of finding us.'

‘Finn reckons they've got these secret agents watching for fluctuations in the weather and stuff. They've got computers monitoring things.'

Ben scrunched his face up. ‘Yeah, and how did they manage to track down destroyers
before
they had computers? No, they must be using their powers to find us, somehow. And if they can do it, there's no reason we can't.'

‘I couldn't when I was with Finn,' I said, in the interests of full disclosure.

‘Yeah, but that's because you were with him,' Ben said. He looked at me, and his face had that bright, vivid, larger-than-life quality he got when his powers were firing. It was like everything about him had intensified, or as if there was a light shining on him, or
from
him, because his eyes looked bluer and his teeth looked whiter and his freckles seemed to zing off his face, so everything about him shone. I felt my own powers start to stir in response.

‘We already know we're stronger together than we are separately,' Ben continued. ‘If we can use our powers to fight agents of order, maybe we can use our powers to
find
them too.'

‘Does that mean you want to try it?' I asked.

‘Sure. Why not?'

I had my school bag over my shoulder with a ton of homework in it and it was about to rain. ‘Can I drop my bag off and get changed first?' I asked.

Ben's eyes crinkled as he smiled at me. ‘Sure,' he said.

Back at my house, Ben waited outside my bedroom door while I took off my uniform and put on my jeans and sneakers, then he came in and we shut the door on my brother Jason.

‘Ooooh, luvvers!' Jason shouted from the other side of the door, making disgusting kissy-kissy noises.

‘So how's this supposed to work?' Ben asked, ignoring Jason.

‘We just open our minds to the universe,' I said.

‘Right then,' Ben said. ‘Let's see what the universe has to say.'

He reached out and took my hand, and I felt a little surge as our fingers touched, like a jolt of electricity, and the bracelet on my wrist seethed and swam and so did the bracelet on his wrist, and it was like something opened inside me and my powers came swooshing out and mingling with his, and I felt a wonderful, terrible excitement rising up inside me, and I saw the same excitement in his eyes, which were so blue as they looked into mine. And then Ben's face faded and my bedroom faded and the sound of Jason exterminating aliens faded, as I let my awareness drift, out of my house and out of my street and out across the city, searching, sniffing, questing, teasing out the tiny hints and vibrations that would alert me to the presence of my enemies, the agents of order.

And I don't know how long we stood like that, linked through our hands while a part of us searched the city, but suddenly we found what we were looking for. I felt
myself snag on something, like a fisherman who's just felt a little tug on the line. And I found myself looking into Ben's eyes, and I didn't even need to ask him if he'd felt it because I knew he had; our minds had been meshed together and were working as one.

‘Shall we go and –'

‘– find it?'

We were thinking the same thoughts. He grinned at me, the thrill of the chase in his eyes, and then we were both out of there, heading for the front door, and Jason was behind me shrilling, ‘Where are you going?' and ‘I'm telling Mum!' but I didn't care, I slammed the door shut behind me and we jumped into Ben's car and took off with the scent of an agent in both our nostrils.

It wasn't like the time Finn had called us. Then, we'd both known exactly where to go. Destroyer GPS had given us instructions and we'd followed them like guided missiles. This time we were guessing, feeling our way, following a trail that grew stronger then fainter, brightened and then vanished and then brightened again, and we changed direction several times and drove in circles and grew tense and angry and uncertain, but whenever we lost the trail all we had to do was touch fingertips and the scent would be there again.

We drove and drove, until at last we both began to sense we were getting close. Although it had taken us a while to pinpoint the spot, the suburb wasn't far from mine. It was a nice place, quiet, with tree-lined streets and low-slung Californian bungalows with flower gardens, the kind of place families lived. We were weaving our way down quiet residential streets now, homing in
on that bright pulsing spark, the signature of an agent of order.

At last we turned into a street and I knew at once we'd arrived. Ben pulled up to the footpath and parked and we got out without saying a word. He reached for my hand and I felt my powers flush vivid and strong into my head. We were close, so close. We drifted along the street together, looking for the house –

And then we found it, a comfortable-looking house with a pocket of green lawn out the front and a family wagon parked in the driveway. I turned to Ben, the excitement fluttering unbearably in my chest, feeling the call to action. My powers were rising to fever pitch. That agent of order was so close now I could almost smell it, and I felt Ben's fingers tighten on mine and then all I could feel was the incandescent rush of my powers as they built and built inside me, ready to be unleashed on our unwitting victim, the agent of order we'd tracked to his lair.

And as we stood there we saw the front door open, and a woman came out escorting a girl who looked about five, dressed in pink ballet tights and a little ballet skirt and a big parka and gumboots. I watched the woman as she helped the little girl into the back seat; she had blonde curly hair and she was wearing jeans and a cardigan with flowers on it, and she looked warm and kind and a little tired. I couldn't have said exactly what I'd been expecting, but I hadn't quite envisaged this: that the agent would be a mum, and youngish, and she'd have a little girl with her, and that she'd look so – well, harmless. And although I couldn't see
if she was wearing a white circle pin, I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that she was the agent of order we'd been hunting.

And she, just as clearly, had no idea we were there. We watched from the other side of the street as she strapped the little girl into her car seat. She was relaxed, untroubled, her movements practised and unhurried. She'd obviously done this a million times before and there was nothing, not so much as a prickle of apprehension, to ruffle her composure. I could feel my heart beating twice as fast as usual and I could hear my pulse like the sound of the ocean, but to her it was just a day like any other. She rifled in her handbag for her keys, which were on a brightly-coloured starfish key-ring. She got into the driver's seat. She turned and backed out of the driveway. And then she swung out onto the street and drove past us without giving us so much as a glance.

Ben took his hand from mine and it felt a bit like someone had just pulled the plug out of the bath. The excitement that had kept my powers pulsing at fever pitch began to ebb. The pressure began to fall. And a terrible uncertainty began to creep in.

We had tracked an agent of order to her house. We knew where she lived. The house was probably protected, but she would be vulnerable when she left it. If we wanted to neutralise her, all we'd have to do was wait.

I noticed an abandoned trike sitting on the driveway, and felt a terrible sense of desolation sweep over me.

I turned to Ben. ‘Let's get out of here,' I said.

We were both silent as we headed home.

At last he pulled up outside my house and switched the engine off. Neither of us got out of the car. The silence was starting to weigh on me. ‘So,' I said, ‘do you think she was … ?'

‘Yep,' Ben said.

We were both silent for a moment.

‘I didn't expect it would be so easy,' I said.

‘Me neither,' Ben said.

‘Finn was right after all,' I said.

Ben's frown deepened. The silence lengthened.

‘That was a mistake,' he said finally.

‘What was?'

‘Doing that. Finding her.'

‘Why?' I asked.

‘Because now,' Ben said, ‘we have to decide what we do about her.'

I felt that odd sense of desolation returning, and I knew what it was now. It was the knowledge that sooner or later I was going to have to do something terrible.

‘We don't have to do anything, do we?' I asked.

Ben turned to me, his face serious and unhappy. ‘You're willing to just let her go, knowing she could come after us at any time?' he asked.

‘But she doesn't know we exist,' I said. ‘She hasn't done anything to us. I couldn't go after her in – in cold blood. Not now I've seen where she lives.' And who she lived with.

Ben studied me for a moment, and then relaxed. ‘No,' he said finally, ‘me neither.'

‘So now what?' I asked.

‘We just forget about her,' Ben said.

‘And what about using our powers to hunt agents?'

‘Only when we have to. Agreed?'

‘Agreed,' I said.